only the last incident in life and not the most important. Of
Bernard's hot passions there was not a sign. Amiable? Laura fancied
that so far as she was concerned she could count on a personal
amiability: he liked her, she was sure of that, his eyes softened
when he spoke to her. But the ruck of people? She doubted whether
Lawrence would have lost his appetite for lunch if they had all been
drowned.

The pleasant, selfish man of the world is a common type, but she
could not confine Lawrence to his type. He basked in the sun:
with every nerve of his thinly-clad body he relinquished himself
to the contact of the warm grass: deliberately and consciously he
was savouring the honied air, the babble of running water, the
caress of the tiny green blades fresh against his cheek and hand,
the swell of earth that supported his broad, powerful limbs.
This sensuous acceptance of the physical joy of life pleased
Laura, born a Selincourt, bred in France, and temperamentally out
of touch with middle-class England.

Whether one could rely on him for any serviceable friendship
Laura was uncertain. As a youth he had inclined to idealize
women, but she was suspicious of his later record. Good or bad
it had left no mark on him. Probably he had not much principle
where women were concerned. Few of the men Laura had known in
early life had had any principles of any sort except a common
spirit of kindliness and fair play. Her brother was always
drifting in and out of amatory entanglements--the hunter or the
hunted--and he was not much the worse for it so far as Laura
could see. Perhaps Hyde was of the game stamp, in which case
there might well be no lines round his mouth, since lines are
drawn by conflict: or perhaps a wandering life had kept him out
of harm's way. It made no great odds to Laura--she had not the
shrinking abhorrence which most women feel for that special form
of evil: it was on the same footing in her mind as other errors
to which male human nature is more prone than female, a little
worse than drunkenness but not so bad as cruelty. From her own
life of serene married maidenhood such sins of the flesh seemed
as remote as murder.

The strong southern light broke in splinters on the dancing
water, and was mirrored in reflected ripplings, silver-pale,
tremulous, over the shadowy understems of grass and loosestrife
on the opposite bank. "And I never gave you anything to drink
after all!" said Laura after a lon